


(all our pieces fall) right into place

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Drabble Sequence, F/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Sex Pollen, not smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 01:16:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13283859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: It's a physiological urge caused by an alien pathogen, it's notreal.Until it is.





	(all our pieces fall) right into place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SafelyCapricious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/gifts).



> A fic in snippets for the ever-amazing safelycapricious on her birthday (barely). <3 <3 <3 <3
> 
> Title from Taylor Swift's "So It Goes..."

 

**annoyance**

 

“Let’s just get this over with,” Jemma says once the barrier is closed behind her. Her robe slips to the ground and she doesn’t mean for it to be sexual—even though there’s little about this that isn’t—but feels a thrill of anticipation as Ward’s eyes drag back up her legs to her face. (It’s not her. It’s the same damned physiological drive that’s brought her down here but it is _not her_.)

His lips quirk and in that sharp smile she sees a promise of what’s to come. She could run, bang on the barrier to be let out and go back to the lab to keep working towards a solution she knows isn’t there.

She steps forward.

 

 

 

 **beginning** (nine months earlier)

 

“We could-”

Jemma winces at the pain in Ward’s voice. And at the steadily climbing ache under her skin, the itch—the _burn—_ to do something other than talk.

“-find someone else? I won’t take it personally, I-”

“Ward,” she says quickly before he can embarrass them both to death (perhaps literally; that lab they raided didn’t employ the most thorough of research methods and she has no idea how long before the negative side effects of their exposure to alien DNA will settle in), “I truly don’t mind. Having sex with you to save both of our lives won’t be a hardship.”

He steps closer, all but erasing the space between them. “I’ll make sure it isn’t,” he promises.

 

 

 

**desire**

 

It wasn’t a one-time thing. The pathogen she and Ward encountered in that lab so long ago changed them on a genetic level. She convinced herself the fevered wanting that overcame her was temporary, something to be worked through and overcome. But as spring turned to summer and the world settled into a new normal in the wake of Hydra’s uprising, she found herself thinking more often of the prisoner in the basement. And not, to her shame, of the danger that he might escape or the trauma he’s caused, but of his hands on her skin and his weight settling over her and the things he did that made her scream. Until one day her blood burned the way it had that day on the Bus and she knew she had to see him again.

 

 

 

**expectations**

 

He wants Skye. She made peace with that long before the uprising so she doesn’t expect it will hurt too much now if he says the other woman’s name while he’s inside her.

But he doesn’t. He keeps his eyes on Jemma and touches her like she’s the one he wants.

Later, while she washes his touch away, she thinks it would be easier if he’d hurt her.

 

 

 

**retreat**

 

Coulson offers her the assignment to go undercover in Hydra. At first she laughs. She _can’t lie_. But he only smiles that fatherly smile that makes her somehow homesick and not at the same time and tells her he thinks she’s more talented than she realizes. She thanks him for the compliment, but declines, saying any intel she does manage to gather won’t be much compared to the trouble of rescuing her when things inevitably go south.

The day after she sleeps with Ward, she asks if that offer is still on the table.

 

 

 

**hello**

 

He’s tried to kill himself since she left. Three times. She’s examined the photos of the wounds and x-rays and yet she still feels her legs go numb beneath her in that cold, metal chair when he steps up to the barrier.

“I can see you missed me,” she says, forcing the words past the curious ache in her chest. “Trip is quite capable but the scarring will be terrible.”

Ward tips his wrist up to examine the worst of the scars. Each second of his silence only tightens her chest further. Why is she here? What can she possibly hope to gain from confronting him?

“I did,” he says. He meets her eyes. “Miss you, I mean.”

 

 

 

**flowers**

 

Her mother calls her a week after Ward escapes to tell her there’s been a delivery of some very attractive flowers for her but the card is signed only with a G. Another comes the next week. And the next.

The others talk about moving her parents for their own safety. Jemma privately thinks it would be a rather sweet gesture coming from anyone else.

 

 

 

**teamwork**

 

Coulson slides a computer printout of the map of the alien city to her. “What would you like me to do with this?” she asks, looking it over for some distinction she knows she won’t find; even now knowing it’s a map, it’s still just a series of nonsense lines and circles to her.

“That one isn’t ours. It’s Hydra’s.”

The paper flutters in her hands.

“Apparently they’ve figured out the carvings on their own—I’d rather not think about how. Ward sent us that.”

“Ward? But-”

“He says, quote, this way we won’t have to risk anyone valuable by sending them undercover again.” Coulson doesn’t say any more. He doesn’t have to.

 

 

 

**xenology**

 

“It’s for your own safety as much as ours,” Bobbi says, speaking of the quarantine cell Jemma is in. The stark white lights aggravate the dendrotoxin headache she awakened with, but that’s nothing to the realization that her former friends are now enemies.

“I didn’t even go into the city,” Jemma says. “There’s nothing I was exposed to that-”

“It isn’t only the city,” Ann cuts in. “SHIELD never properly studied what happened to you last year. We couldn’t risk what you might do if you were allowed to go down there.”

As Jemma herself has spent much of the past year studying those changes and _she_ remains a loyal SHIELD agent, she refutes that rather strenuously. Neither Bobbi nor Ann—nor the armed guards they put on her cell—are moved.

 

 

 

**hero**

 

Two flashes of blue are followed by a familiar face in the window.

She sighs. “Of bloody course it would be _you_.”

Ward smiles back. “I can see you missed me.”

She bites down a smile of her own. She’ll never admit he’s right.

 

 

 

**touch**

 

Ward seems always to be touching her in the weeks they spend running from the false SHIELD and he doesn’t seem to care if the others notice. (In fact she thinks he prefers they do.) He sits hip-to-hip with her in the quinjet and rests his hand on her back during mission planning and, when there’s too much distance between them for physical contact, his eyes unerringly turn to her.

She doesn’t spurn him the way she once would have—and it’s _not_ the flowers or the gifts of intel, no matter what the others think—he _saved_ her. She saw the way Ann was looking at her, the worry mixed with determination on her face. It was only a matter of time before their unethical study of her descended into something even worse. And Ward, the only other victim to survive exposure to the pathogen, risked his own life by coming to her aid. Surely Ann would have preferred to begin her experiments on the Hydra traitor rather than her former student. But still he came. So she doesn’t see much cause to push him away when his proximity does no one any harm.

How that translates into her sharing his bed, she isn’t quite as sure of.

 

 

 

**out cold**

 

Something buzzes low on her hip and she thinks at first it’s her phone, but her fingers curl in soft hair and she realizes it’s not hard plastic buzzing but muffled laughter falling from warm lips.

“Did I pass out?” she asks.

“Little bit.” He sounds so _proud_ that she just can’t let that stand. She uses the warmth of her afterglow to summon the strength to roll him under her and in seconds she has him squirming, already half-begging as she begins doing that thing she was pleased last year to learn he loves.

 

 

**forever**

 

They’ve been back in the Playground for weeks but it’s only now that Grant’s future is secure—no execution by the traitors, no mental manipulation by Coulson—that she feels safe within its solid walls. Perhaps that’s why, in a fit of sentimentality, she whispers, “I love you.” Grant doesn’t stir. He’s been sleeping for nearly an hour, head pillowed on her stomach, which is the only reason she was able to muster the courage to say it.

Still, she’s not terribly surprised to find a strange new weight on her left hand when she wakes.

Ward smiles in that cocky way of his as he steps out of the bathroom. She drops her hand to the blankets. “Are you even going to ask?”

He laughs like she’s already answered and falls on his knees at her bedside. “Marry me.”

That’s still not a question. She says yes anyway.

 


End file.
